Searching for a supersolid in cold-atom optical lattices

Abstract

We suggest a technique for the observation of a predicted supersolid phase in extended Bose-Hubbard models which are potentially realizable in cold-atom optical lattice systems. In particular, we discuss important subtleties arising from the existence of the trapping potential which lead to an externally imposed (as opposed to spontaneous) breaking of translational invariance. We show, by carefully including the trapping potential in our theoretical formalism, that noise correlations could prove instrumental in identifying the supersolid and density wave phases. We also find that the noise correlation peak width scales inversely with the relative size of trapped Mott domains. © 2006 The American Physical Society.